What Are The Fastest And Slowest Ironman 140.6 Races?

Personal records. Everybody wants them. While you may have spent this past weekend watching college basketball, my nose was in my laptop poring over results from every Ironman race put on last year. My goal was to determine exactly which were the fastest and which were the slowest, based on average finishing time. I also downloaded over a million Ironman and half-Ironman athlete statistics – such as age, transition times, and more – so this will definitely be part 1 of a multi-part blog post series.

As you can see, the difference between the fastest race and the slowest race was nearly three full hours, an enormous differential in a sport where PR attempts often come down to minutes. The difference between the slowest Ironman (Taiwan) and the fastest (Brazil) was driven by all three events: a 19 minute slower swim, a 1 hour and 7 minute slower bike, and a brutal 1 hour and 16 minute slower run time.

What was the cause of this? WeatherUnderground.com tells me that the high temperature in Penghu, Taiwan on October 1 was a record-breaking 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Surprisingly, Brazil’s Ironman reached 87 degrees on May 28 and still managed to come in quickest for the year, and Tim Don posted an incredible world-record time of 7:40:23.